Flash lights for 5 mins?

Hi

I’m looking to flash all the Hue lights in the house for 5 mins, if my alarm is triggered. I’ve look at ‘The Flasher’ app however this looks to have a max number of flashes, is there a way to flash the lights for an extended amount of time?

Thanks

Group them (using Trend Setter app for example) and then use CoRE to flash them as many times as you like. That’s just how I do it…there are probably many other solutions.

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Hi, thanks for the reply, i’ve tried this in Core but when I use the ‘Flash’ option for the light, I set the on and off milliseconds to 1000 and tried to set the number of flashes but get an error saying I can only set 10, which would only give me 20 secs. Do I need to do this and then somehow keep repeating the same piston?

Ah, OK, yes, I didn’t realise this. You’re right in that the max is 10, I just tried.
How about making the intervals longer? Although that won’t get you to 5 minutes without very long ‘on’ and/or ‘offs’.

I’m sure you can make the piston repeat a number of times…but my knowledge of CoRE isn’t that advanced to advise.

Just loop the action
Start a Simple Loop for X amount of times
Then set your flash perimeters
Then End Loop

Case Study - Flash Lights For Approximate Time

I believe I have a working example to test beyond my world. After being triggered by a motion sensor, a FOR loop is used as a counter. An appealing flashing rate is 2 seconds on/off, so 2000ms each. With a maximum of 10 times we can call flash in one call, 2000ms x 2 x 10 = about 40 seconds. This in turn becomes our wait time to fire off another flash cycle.

The FOR loop count number, in this example 5, gives you approximately 5 minutes worth of flashing. Change this number for more or less time in total of flashing.

I’ve not tried it, but you might be able to put this into a DO and just call it from another Piston.

Give it a shot.
Peace.

Before you begin, turn on Advanced Mode by going into Settings->ExpertFeatures->Expert Mode

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